zenpundit.com

HOUSEKEEPING

My PC problems continue apace after the second system crash in as many weeks. It’s up and running again but the question is for how long ? It’s the oldest computer in the house and has worked well for the most part but it may be time to start saving all my files and scanning for the next generation of home electronics. The laptop is cool to take to work, not so cool to hunch over for an hour writing blog posts.

As I was reloading lost programs and apps last night, I fiddled with the SpringWidget in the margin to add some new RSS feeds to my own( Tom and The Small Wars Council). I’ll round it out in a few days with a mil-theory circle of bloggers and sites. Once I’m done, readers who really enjoy this genre can simply copy the embed code and stick it on their own pages (it goes into blogs, myspace, xanga -whatever) or modify it as they wish.

If you are, unlike myself, genuinely computer-crafty, you might wish to look at Grazr’s capabilities first, as this app migt suit your needs better. Critt, who was an early adapter of OPML, can do some amazing things with a grazr.

The blogroll needs updating, pruning and featuring of new additions.

Much to do. Much to do….

READING GIBSON

A while back, while sitting around an alcohol -laden table with Dan of tdaxp, Shlok and Isaac and listening to an evolving debate (primarily between Dan and Isaac) over the probable nature of AI, references to William Gibson’s first novel, Neuromancer were made. I then chimed in that I had never read the book – a statement that was greeted with surprise and some degree of mock horror. This had happened to me once before with Dave Schuler and Lexington Green, except that in that instance the author was Philip K. Dick and the book then was The Man in the High Castle. Evidently, something about having drinks with fellow bloggers is a spur to my reading classic science fiction.

Admittedly, I am not a great reader of fiction, at least if ” great” means ” broadly read”. As a youth, I did dive deeply into J.R.R. Tolkien, Ayn Rand and George Orwell – I’ve probably read every word ever published by the first two authors and much by the third. Russian lit figures prominently, especially Dostoyevskii and Solzhenitsyn. Of American writers, I’ve read a scattering of Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, J.D. Salinger, John Steinbeck and a few others, but none systematically or deeply.

I’ve meant to read Quo Vadis, Don Quixote and Blood Meridian for years and have yet to do so. I have only a few works of Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Koestler, Balzac and Victor Hugo under my belt. The reason being that for me, the siren call of non-fiction is all too strong. There are too many important books that ” must” be read ASAP, piled on top of others that ” should” be read; picking up good fiction under those conditions almost feels like shirking a responsibility.

I say this as a preface to acknowledging how much I enjoyed reading Neuromancer. While the book is old hat to sci-fi fans, it came as a fresh voice to me, mixed with an unfolding appreciation of how Gibson’s fictional efforts have influenced or anticipated the evolution of the culture. Movies, TV shows, references, characters all flashed through my mind as I read it and Gibson’s economy of explanation allowed my mind the freedom to engage the text and fill in the blanks. Reticence is a vital skill that few authors ever manage to master but Gibson has it. I’m sorry that I didn’t read the book back in the early 1980’s when the novelty of the book’s imaginative scenario were at peak.

Isaac has pointed me toward Pattern Recognition and I now have an itch for Spook Country as well. If you have read Gibson’s books, what do you think of them and what titles do you favor ?

A MANTRA I CAN LIVE WITH

As the dreaded Four-Zero raises it’s head on my own horizon, I am much relieved to hear that Shane has declared ” Forty is the New Twenty!”.

Woo-hoo! Happy Birthday Shane!

NEITHER GANDALF NOR HARRY POTTER

My friend Shane Deichman of Enterra and IATGR has jumped with both feet into the blogosphere at The Wizards of Oz. I’d like to welcome Shane to blogging and I encourage you to check out his latest post – “Large Numbers “. An excerpt:

“A famous thought experiment postulates that a monkey, strumming unintelligently on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time, would eventually create all of the works of Shakespeare. Although often attributed to T.H. Huxley, a 19th century English biologist, it is a metaphor used in a 1913 essay by Émile Borel to describe large, random sequences of numbers.

…So let’s go back to our monkey. As an undergraduate physics major at Berkeley, one of the first homework problems in my thermodynamics class was a variation of the “infinite monkey theorem”: we had to determine the probability of a trillion monkeys, typing randomly without pause at 10 keys per second, to randomly type the words of Hamlet. By assuming Hamlet was comprised of approximately 100,000 characters, and that a typical keyboard has 40 keys (without regard for punctuation or capitalization), the probability of a random string is 1/40 * 1/40 * 1/40 …, repeated 100,000 times.Since we had a trillion (i.e., 1E12) monkeys typing continuously at 10 keys per second, our solution was that it would likely take 1E1000 years — in other words, nearly googol (1E100) times the age of our known universe — before reaching a 50% probability….“

Read Shane’s post in full.

While as a society, we are generally aware of the handicaps created by illiteracy, the effects of innumeracy are not well recognized. However, the widespread inability amongst the public to comprehend the significance of large numbers and to weigh the relative importance of probability between variables, negatively effects the ability of the electorate to make informed choices regarding public policy. Or correctly identify economic trends, causation and effect. Or even have a rational discourse on many subjects, leaving the field wide open to demagoguery and magical thinking.

AMUSING

In an admission of cheap bastardy, Dan of tdaxp ponders his nightlife and transportation options in our nation’s capitol on $ 5 a day.